EXCLUSIVE! Katherine Heigl Talks Baby Naleigh: 'I Give Up — She Is So Her Father's Daughter!'

It’s no use — Katherine Heigl has accepted the fact that her 24-month-old daughter Naleigh Kelley has a favorite parent — her singer daddy, Josh Kelley! “I’ve given it up,” Katherine told HollyBaby.com at the NYC premiere of her new movie Life As We Know It on Sept. 29. “I’m letting go. I mean she is so her father’s daughter and she adores him!”

It’s totally OK with the former Grey’s Anatomy star that Naleigh is a daddy’s girl because “he’s so fantastically wonderful with her,” Katherine explained to us. “You know the alternative would be that he isn’t so hands-on with her, so I can’t be upset that she prefers him.” Good thinking Katherine!

“There is an instinct for this [being a parent], that I think you have to trust,” Katherine added. “I just have an instinct for when Naleigh is gassy or when she’s hungry or when she’s just tired and cranky. There’s a different aura about her in those moments and I feel like a lot of times people will try and talk you out of it and be like, ‘Nah, she’s fine’ or ‘I bet she’s just tired.’ For me, being a mom, was kind of like, ‘You know what? I got this. Thank you very much. I got it.'”

Katherine, who adopted Naleigh in Sept. 2009 — just four days prior to the start of filming for Life As We Know It, believes that being a new parent even helped her to play her character of Holly Berenson (who becomes a parent herself after her best friends pass away in a car accident and leave their daughter to her care) in the romantic comedy. “It influenced every aspect of my performance because I couldn’t really even divorce myself from the role,” Katherine shared. “I was just living on camera what I was living at home. I didn’t have the emotional stability at that point to just go on camera and be someone else and do it differently from how I was experiencing it. So it was like a living journal for me.”